Apple’s Announcement, Great. But What Does it Mean for Business Users?

Today brings exciting news from Apple, the announcement of iPhone 6, featuring the iPhone’s largest screen size yet, and the company’s first wearable device.

Enterprises are rapidly adopting Apple devices across the board. Employees prefer Apple devices, whether company-owned or BYOD, for their elegant experience and lightweight form factors. Unfortunately, the majority of companies struggle to provide their employees with a robust set of applications on their iOS devices. Rather than going mobile first (and only), they prefer their employees use iOS devices for simple tasks and Windows-based laptops for more complex work.

This morning’s announcement raises the number of Apple form factors from four to seven. More importantly, the Watch presents interesting opportunities for users who’s jobs require them to work on the go – like regulators who do assessments in the field and financial service teams who track or model information, generating revenue by trading. These users need to act on information, literally at their fingertips. They don’t have the luxury of waiting till they are in front of a laptop to do their work.

Native deployment, the traditional option for migrating apps onto such mobile devices is extremely time consuming and expensive. And alternatives, such as VDI (Citrix and it’s competitors) present a terrible mobile user experience greatly reducing their potential effectiveness. Such issues can only be exacerbated as new device form factors continue to enter the market like Apple’s iWatch and iPhones 6’s different form factors.

So while today’s Apple news is certainly exciting, it does present another challenge for enterprise IT departments that need to support powerful new devices. How do we get all of our existing applications onto these new form factors in a timely and cost effective manner with the optimal user experience?

At PowWow, we help you release your workforce, harnessing enterprise applications for the mobile and wearable world. Email or give us a call if you’re interested in seeing your legacy apps instantly transformed for mobile!

Andrew Cohen, CEO, PowWow Inc.